In 2023, Indonesia was officially recorded as the country with the highest number of endangered languages in Asia — a staggering 425 languages currently at risk of extinction. This figure, sourced from the latest linguistic documentation by Seasia Stats, puts Indonesia far ahead of other culturally rich nations like Papua New Guinea (312), China (133), and India (114). While this statistic reflects Indonesia's remarkable linguistic diversity, it also rings a loud alarm bell about the precarious future of the country’s intangible cultural heritage.
A Nation of Languages — And the Risk of Losing Them
Indonesia is often praised as one of the most linguistically diverse nations in the world. Spread across more than 17,000 islands, over 700 languages are spoken by communities as varied as the Dayak in Kalimantan, the Asmat in Papua, the Sasak in Lombok, and the Toraja in Sulawesi. Each language is a vessel of history, worldview, knowledge, and spirituality.
However, in recent decades, hundreds of these languages have been teetering on the edge of extinction. Some are spoken by fewer than 100 people. Others have no living native speakers left. The rise of endangered languages in Indonesia is not just about words dying out — it is about cultures vanishing silently.
Why Are So Many Languages Endangered in Indonesia?
Several intertwined factors contribute to the rapid decline of minority languages across the archipelago:
1. Dominance of Bahasa Indonesia
Indonesia’s national language, Bahasa Indonesia, has been incredibly effective in uniting the country since its independence. But this success has come with a cost. Local languages have been increasingly pushed to the margins, especially in formal settings like schools, offices, and mass media. In many households, parents now prioritize Bahasa Indonesia over local languages to ensure their children’s academic and professional advancement.
2. Urbanization and Migration
As Indonesians migrate from rural villages to urban centers, often for economic reasons, smaller language communities become fragmented. In cities like Jakarta, Surabaya, or Medan, the social pressure to adopt Indonesian or English often outweighs the incentive to maintain a regional mother tongue.
3. Lack of Intergenerational Transmission
Perhaps the most critical factor is that younger generations are no longer learning or speaking their heritage languages. This breaks the chain of transmission and pushes the language closer to extinction. In some cases, even the last fluent speakers are elderly individuals with no one to pass the language to.
4. Neglect in Policy and Education
Although Indonesia’s Language Agency (Badan Bahasa) and some local governments have programs to document and promote local languages, efforts are often underfunded, uncoordinated, and reactive rather than proactive. Language preservation is rarely integrated into national education policy or digital content strategies.
How Indonesia Compares With Other Asian Nations
Looking at the broader Asian context, Indonesia stands out not just because of its high number of endangered languages but also due to the gap between policy ambition and ground-level action. Papua New Guinea, for example, has fewer endangered languages (312), but stronger community-led documentation efforts. In India and China, local languages are often integrated into school curricula and media production — though challenges remain there too.
In Southeast Asia, Malaysia has 82 endangered languages, while the Philippines has 48, Nepal 62, Vietnam 29, and Iran 36. These numbers suggest that linguistic endangerment is a regional issue, often connected to modernization, national integration efforts, and digital displacement.
But Indonesia’s number is in a league of its own — and that’s both a point of pride and a warning.
Why This Matters — The Stakes of Language Loss
Losing a language means losing more than a way to speak. Languages encode environmental knowledge, agricultural practices, medicinal systems, oral literature, ancestral laws, and philosophical worldviews. For indigenous communities in Papua, for example, certain languages contain vocabulary that describes soil types, bird behavior, and cloud formations with astonishing precision — knowledge that may be lost forever if the language disappears.
Moreover, languages are a source of identity and psychological grounding. Their extinction can lead to a sense of cultural dislocation among young people and even contribute to mental health challenges in some communities.
Efforts to Preserve Local Languages — Too Little, Too Scattered?
Despite the alarming statistics, all is not lost. There are promising efforts from scholars, NGOs, and local communities. The Language Development and Fostering Agency (Badan Bahasa) has been working to document and categorize languages across the archipelago, publishing dictionaries, grammar books, and online archives. Some universities, like Universitas Indonesia and Universitas Udayana, run linguistics departments that actively research regional dialects.
There are also grassroots initiatives. In East Nusa Tenggara, local schools are experimenting with bilingual education. In Papua, a group of elders and youth are recording traditional chants and folklore to pass down. And across Indonesia, the rise of digital platforms offers a new frontier for language preservation — from YouTube storytelling channels in local languages to mobile apps teaching endangered scripts.
But these efforts often operate in silos. What Indonesia lacks is a cohesive, well-funded, nationwide language revitalization strategy.
A Cultural Crisis — and an Opportunity
The current state of endangered languages in Indonesia is undoubtedly a crisis — but it can also be a catalyst. A chance to rethink what it means to be Indonesian in a diverse nation. A chance to pass on more than just infrastructure or technology to future generations, but also stories, wisdom, and voices from the past.
If Indonesia moves quickly and boldly, it can still save hundreds of languages from extinction — and inspire other nations to do the same. Let this not be the decade of disappearance, but the beginning of a linguistic renaissance.
